People come here in droves, and not just Grey Lynn and Ponsonby trendies. Brian even runs a courier service for customers in Whangarei and Hamilton.
And he doesn't like genetic engineering one little bit.
"It's a terrible thing, there's no need for it, it's not proven," he says.
Down the road at Harvest Wholefoods the queues are often as long as at Foodtown on a Friday night. At Kelmarna Organic Gardens - where they've been running a vegetable business since a nun from the nearby convent dug the first plot decades ago - the attitude is similar.
Today, Kelmarna is owned by the Auckland City Council and run by the Framework Trust. Organic eggs (40c each) from chickens reared on garden waste and spray-free wheat, nestle alongside extremely puny capsicums. Still, the cape gooseberries taste like they did when I was a child.
"It [modern agriculture and GE] is actually about the whole environmental eco-system," Susan Barker says. "It's about devastating and dominating the environment rather than co-existing. Artificial fertilisers have really blown vegetables up - that's why they get pests and diseases."
At Kelmarna they rely on a little weeding, very little forking-over, home-made liquid fertiliser and compost (there's a cow down the back).
Pest control consists of companion planting, the use of plants like parsnips that attract beneficial insects, mixed planting "which confuses insects" and "sacrificial cabbages," which are demolished by insects while their vege mates in other rows thrive.
And no, they are not interested in using GE plants to improve their organic performance. Barker is put off by "a Waikato experiment wanting to put a cow gene into sheep to get more meat."
She is concerned about it because the long-term consequences are not known. "People are acting out of fear because they don't have any control over these big companies and scientific lobby groups. We don't know what's going on."
The case Barker is referring to falls into the GE confusion basket. It is actually an AgResearch field trial application, now before Erma, to GE some sheep in an effort to study muscle growth and ultimately develop treatments for people with muscle-wasting in old age, a tendency to heart attacks, and muscular dystrophy.
The gene pattern scientists are hoping to achieve - which is found naturally in Holstein cattle - involves knocking out the sheep's own myostatin gene rather than introducing foreign genes.
Although we're seeing more organic food and it is in hot international demand, licensed organic production is still a relatively small part of New Zealand production. While the local business is growing by 20 per cent a year, last year only $35 million of exports gained Bio-gro organic certification, most of them from huge Heinz Wattie organic farms in Hawkes Bay.
Overall, organic exports are expected to grow to $65 million this year - a tiny slice against Britain's $1600 million industry and United States forecasts for a $90 billion market by 2006. Denmark expects to be totally organic by 2020.
The balance of our agricultural and horticultural production is heavily hooked into pesticide/herbicide/fungicide/artificial fertiliser post-war production methods, which, over the past 30 years biotechnologists have been trying to help producers move away from.
Gavin Ross of HortResearch explains that 90 per cent of their GE work has been concentrated on helping plants build the kind of natural resistance that would help the organic industry stay organic.
GE techniques in the pipette line promise increased pest resistance (meaning fewer pesticides), increased hardiness (less artificial feeding), and resistance to fungal infection (reduced need for fumigation including irradiation).
Dr Sue Gardiner, of HortResearch in Palmerston North, has spent the past 10 years doing nothing more sinister than using molecular "markers" to identify "pyramids"of genes which have been transferred from hardy wild crabapple trees into modern eating apples to improve their resistance to black spot and woolly aphids.
She says that "if resistance genes are deployed singly by traditional methods they can be far more easily overcome by changes in pests or diseases - then they are useless and a lost resource forever."
Gardiner uses molecular markers similar to DNA fingerprints to identify those seedlings that have inherited the desired pyramid of resistance genes - simultaneously halving the time needed to develop a new variety.
Our apple industry depends on premium cultivars that can reach the top of the market, Gardiner says.
"There's a constant need for new varieties, for crispness, juiciness, ability to store well and pest and disease-resistance. Incorporation of pyramided resistance genes means growers of the future will be able to reduce sprayings and sell the apples as 'low residue' - and they'll be much easier to grow organically."
Gardiner's other work contributes to cloning crabapple resistance genes in the lab, eventually producing resistant eating varieties more quickly and efficiently.
The work is hard and expensive. The GE method is faster and puts far less bitter and unpalatable crabapple DNA into the apple than traditional breeding methods, she says.
"We hope the political climate will change by the time we finish. If we don't do the research now, we won't be there with a product in time."
Gardiner believes people don't think carefully enough about risk-assessment.
"It's frustrating. We eat plants infected with fungal disease and we know fungi are potentially carcinogenic. The plant looks clean and sparkly but it has fungal spray on it - or you can eat a GM apple. Either way there's a risk."
Well actually, she admits later, Gardiner would eat the GE apple - if she was allowed to.
"I don't believe there's a risk. They're all checked. More carefully checked out of the GM programme than out of the traditional programme.
Today however, there is little chance of using GE products to improve the safety and performance of organic food. International guidelines for organically produced food, set by the British Soil Association, allow no more than 1 per cent GE content.
In New Zealand, which works to guidelines set down by the International Federation of Organic-Agriculture Movements, no GE organisms, breeds and varieties may be used in producing organic foods.
A leaflet from the Soil Association calls for two moves.
"Make Aotearoa New Zealand organic by 2020 and ban genetic engineering," says Seager Mason, technical advisor for Bio-Gro, New Zealand's main organic certifier.
"Even United States national standards drafted recently exclude GE." This move came after the Food and Drug Administration, under pressure from biotech companies, tried to allow genetically engineered organisms into organically certified foods, "and received 270,000 submissions against."
As Mason points out, the distrust of GE food is part of a general consumer resistance to unsafe food. In Britain, fear of food was generated by the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) scandal and Japan and Korea have similar fears of an ecoli outbreak.
In New Zealand, fears have more to do with pesticides, animal welfare and imported hysteria through pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
Jim Watson, of Genesis, the country's biggest biotech and discovery company, says people are acting as though our agricultural practices are safe and pure. In fact, the post-Second World War "green revolution," coupled with intensive farming practices, mean such a preconception is not true. About 30,000 tonnes of chemicals are used every year in Britain.
"Agriculture today is the most chemically intensive industry in the world," Watson says. "Many chemicals used to kill weeds and pests are known to cause health risks to agricultural workers and to cause soil and water contamination."
The Lancet has published the first firm evidence that environmental pollution is linked to high levels of PCBs in the bloodstream. This, in turn, is linked to cancer in humans. New Zealand now has the third-highest mortality rate from cancer in OECD countries.
David Irving, former CEO of Heinz Wattie and the man behind the company's organic and sustainable development thrusts, talks about how Heinz Wattie insisted that growers drop their spray applications from as high as 18 a season to no more than four. "Growers welcomed it in the end," he says.
Professor Bob Parker, who heads the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, talks about how scientists have found DDT residue , even in Antarctica, and about a London colleague who asked him to take over the rearing of some white butterfly caterpillars because he couldn't keep them alive on supermarket cabbages - presumably because they were too toxic.
As Dr Julian Schroeder, a University of California genetics professor, asks: "Would you rather eat an ear of Bt corn which has one protein added to its genetic makeup or one that has been sprayed with eight different pesticides - such toxic stuff that you need to wash your hands after peeling that ear of corn? And remember, Bt toxins have been researched a lot. They are very specific to certain insect families. No toxicity has been found in animals."
Even organic-certified produce is not necessarily safe. Dr Phil Dale, who did the first British field trials with GE crops in 1987, points out that the negative side of organics is copper sulphate used as a fungicide.
In some parts of Spain the land is contaminated with copper, he says. And there's aafatoxin, a dangerous fungus that can proliferate in stored food if it is not controlled.
Genetic engineering could definitely provide part of the answer to reducing pesticides. Brian Johnson, of English Nature, the British Government's statutory conservation arm, says: "GM could reduce our dependence on herbicides and fungicides without adding [toxic] pesticide genes.
"Plants could be made resistant by making them hardier, or with thicker skins so that insects couldn't eat them. They could make plants resistant to fungi by switching on genes that are accidentally switched off in the adult plant.
"Maybe one day we'll reach the holy grail - nitrogen fixation [plants that can make their own nitrogen therefore don't need artificial fertilisers]."
Though people such as Mason are convinced that biological control is the way to go, other local proponents of sustainable agriculture dedicated to using the most ecologically and people-friendly processes available are cautiously enthusiastic about the positive side of certain GE technology.
They certainly don't see the two systems as mutually exclusive. Guy Salmon, chief executive of the Ecologic Foundation, says Argentina, one of our competitors in the international agricultural market, already has 300,000ha of organics and a much larger area of GE crops.
"The GE crops have vastly improved soil conservation efforts from a land sustainablility point-of-view," Salmon says.
"The point is that carefully managed, we can exploit the positive aspects ... GE could improve the environment. That case needs to looked at rather than straight-out dismissed.
"Competitiveness is a real issue. If one of our competitors got in first, say with a GM dairy product that would eliminate or reduce the risk of heart disease, we could be in trouble."
Salmon is a realist. Although he is keen to have a moratorium on the commercial introduction of GE mechanisms until an effective regulatory framework is in place for agriculture, he insists that turning New Zealand into a totally organic producer would be next to impossible, especially on our five million hectares of gorse-prone hill country.
On the other hand, sustainable agriculture, which is about reducing impact on the environment "using methods which nature's own processes can manage," is a viable alternative to present methods.
His recommendation is that the Royal Commission of Inquiry should include a debate about sustainable agricultural techniques.
Dr Stephen Goldson, of the Independent Biotechnology Advisory Council, an ecologist who works in the biological control of pests, thinks that genetically engineered products - if they were allowed - might assist in reducing pesticide use.
"I think it will become one of the range of options," he says. "There are huge advantages. But GE crops might attract their own range of pests that we haven't even thought of."
It is also essential to protect our faming base, to keep up with the rest of the world and to not get out of step with increasingly organic European buyers.
Dale suggests that New Zealand should look carefully at the GM/organics option (and sustainable agriculture) which has been rejected by Britain.
"I believe that organics and GM are beautifully complementary," Dale says. "The science could go so many ways. The challenge is to direct research in ways that are of benefit to mankind. That's the difference between Britain and North America. The 'market forces rule' view is much stronger in America. My gut reaction is that market forces are too crude really to determine our future."
Then there is the need to feed an ever-expanding world. Putting aside the scandals over food mountains, political sanctions and distribution, not to mention the seed cartels Monsanto threatened in the late-90s, the developing world is desperate for food.
One billion people go to sleep hungry every night and there are 40,000 hunger-related deaths every day.
By 2020, when the population hits eight billion, half the world's people will not have enough water to grow their own food, let alone use the traditional organic methods advocated by activists.
Florence Wambugu, writing in Nature magazine, has attacked the way European fear of agribiotech is threatening GE use in Africa.
"The critics of biotechnology claim that Africa will be a dumping ground or exploited by multinationals," Wambugu says.
"On the contrary, small-scale farmers have benefited by using hybrid seeds from local and multinational companies. There is every reason to believe they will also benefit from the crop-protection transgenic techniques already in the pipeline for bananas such as sigatoka, the disease-resistant variety now ready for field trials.
"The African continent, more than any other, urgently needs agricultural biotechnology to improve food production.
"There is potential to double African crop production if viral diseases are controlled using transgenic technology.
"There is no evidence to suggest that Africa should be excluded from transgenic crops. Africans can speak for themselves."
Geneticist Chris Somerville, of Stanford University, points out that four hundred million people a year suffer from serious Vitamin A deficiency and one million of them die every year.
"However, by using genes from the daffodil, we have created rice that is not only yellow but contains vitamin A. That rice will be distributed throughout the Third World in the next couple of years."
But Somerville emphasised that in the 12 years it took to develop golden rice, the world's population increased by another one billion to its present six billion.
"If we want to make breakthroughs we will have to develop many more products like golden rice," Somerville says.
Yet the West, particularly Europe, is dragging its heels over GE and Somerville says Europeans "are going to have to carry a very heavy moral burden over their attitude to biotechnology."
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